The Aggregate refers to a collection of
researchers and the technologies that they use to make the
components of a computing system work better together. Since
before our first Linux PC work in the PAPERS project, we have
been considering all aspects of Compilers, Hardware
Architectures, and Operating Systems (KAOS) together, optimizing system
performance rather than performance of the individual parts.
The only aspect of our computer system designs that
is set in stone is our name.

Pebble Of The Day/Week/Whenever

9AM-1PM, February 24, 2018
The University of Kentucky College of Engineering is having it's
Engineers Day Open House.
Unfortunately, the Marksbury building will not
be open for eDay... so you'll have to see our lab some other time.
However, a lot will be going on, and we'll be over on the 5th floor
of FPAT with our exhibit:
Lights, Camera, Computation!

January 28 - February 2, 2018
We presented two papers and a research exhibit at the
Electronic Imaging 2018 conference:
Lessons from design, construction, and use of various
multicameras (slides,
paper) and
Multispectral, high dynamic range, time domain continuous imaging
(paper).

October 17, 2017
Hasan Seyyedhasani will defend his MS Thesis,
Intelligent UAV scouting for field condition monitoring,
at 3-5PM in 102A Marksbury. All are welcome to attend.

October 11-12, 2017
Prof. Dietz will be presenting
How Low Can You Go? and will be on the
panel Compilers and Languages for Parallel Computing - What have we Achieved?
at LCPC 2017.
Here are my slides from the panel....

2:00-2:50PM, September 29, 2017
Prof. Dietz will be giving an ECE Colloquium Lecture Series talk,
in the University of Kentucky's RMB 323. As Time Goes By.
is about frameless computational rendering and image capture.
Here are the slides as a PDF,
which unfortunately turns the videos into a single still image each.

January 29 -- February 2, 2017
We had four papers and a research exhibit at Electronic Imaging 2017. The papers are:
A Canon Hack Development Kit implementation of
Time Domain Continuous Imaging
(full paper),
Refining raw pixel values using a value error model
to drive texture synthesis
(slides,
full paper),
TIK: a time domain continuous imaginge testbed using
conventional still images and video
(slides,
full paper), and
Temporal super-resolution for time domain continuous imaging
(slides,
full paper).
The full paper links now point at the official site,
where the papers are freely available.

October 31, 2016
We've been quietly working with a little laser engraver....
Today we posted our Instructable,
Making Your Mini Laser Engraver Safer And Better,
which explains our simple mods, including some 3D printed parts
(also posted, as Thing 1859303)
As of November 5, there are over 30K views of this Instructable
and Instructables notified us that they'll be promoting this workon Facebook;
we've also just added a 10th step about placing a webcam inside.

Summer 2016
It's a very busy Summer for Aggregate.Org. We're really moving on
the TDCI computational photography research, but also on lots more
from supercomputing to 3D printing.
We'll be releasing a lot of goodies this Summer... so stay tuned!

May 25, 2016KNITT is now available as a WWW form CGI.
What does it do? Well, it helps you go from a logical supercomputer
network design to a physical implementation -- for example, using
GA technology to minimize the number of wires crossing between racks.
We built our first such tools back in 2000, and showed a (simpler)
version of KNITT at IEEE/ACM SC2012, but this version is a big step forward.

May 2016
You might have noted
the return of senscape.org and
www.lcpcworkshop.org.
We're still reorganizing our WWW stuff (and machine room), but things
are finally coming together....

May 11, 2016
We did a little presentation on computer engineering (and 3D printing)
for the Henry Clay High School STEM club....
Here are the slides used.

Spring 2016
Prof. Dietz spent most of his time in upgrading EE480,
the advanced undergraduate computer architecture course.
The students not only implemented multi-cycle and pipelined processors,
but even a floating-point unit for the pipelined version.
A lot of online tools were created for the course; for example,
here
is a little thing that integrates running Icarus Verilog and Covered.

November 15-19, 2015
Come see us at SC15!
Our exhibit page says more about what
we're doing, including a little explanation of how to solve the
3D-printed FNN puzzles we've been handing out.
This year, our research exhibit is "University of Kentucky / Aggregate.Org"
rather than "Aggregate.Org / University of Kentucky" -- the last year our
group intends to be leading in putting together the university's exhibit.

October 26, 2015
Re-build party! We'll be re-arranging parts to make a 96-node cluster
in 108A Marksbury. If you're a student at UK, you're welcome to join us;
we could use help from 9AM-5PM.

October 9, 2015
End of days for HAK. We'll be dismantling the 96-node HAK cluster and
a 32-node Pentium 4 cluster in 672FPAT starting around 1PM. The useful
bits of HAK will be going to 108 Marksbury to be absorbed into an upgrade
of NAK.

September 25, 2015
We are proud to announce the posting of KARWY,
a program that performs credible repair of artifacts in Sony ARW2 raw files
using analysis of pixel value uncertainty and computational texture synthesis.

February 10, 2015
Prof. Dietz presented two papers (one talk, one poster) and a research exhibit
at the SPIE Electronic Imaging conference. The papers are:
ISO-less?
(slides,
slides) and
Frameless representation and manipulation of image data,
(full paper).

January 26, 2015
Our primary CGI server died.
Thus, various interactive things will not be working.
This notice will be modified when things are back up.

January 6, 2015
We've been working with 3D printing technology for a while,
but we've finally built some support software worthy of distribution.
Trace2SCAD: Converting Images Into OpenSCAD Models is a
simple script that automates creation of bounded-complexity
OpenSCAD 3D models from 2D images.

October 10, 2014
At 1:30, we invite students who would like to learn
more about our research group to join us in
108 Marksbury. Of course, folks are generally welcome
to drop by whenever we're around the lab, but this is
an opportunity to get a more coherent overview.

October 3, 2014
A new MAGIC algorithm has been added
to test for a pair of integer values being within a given
tolerance of each other.

September 10, 2014
Professor Dietz's Aunt Madeline is 100 years old.
We had a website, http://madeline100.com/, which
was celebrating that and her travels,
which have taken her to over 100 countries...
but that site is now something completely different
with which we have no connection.

March 13-16, 2014
Lexington, Kentucky hosted
IEEE SoutheastCon 2014,
which was not only an IEEE regional conference with all the
activities you'd expect, but also continued the tradition
of having a technical program with peer-reviewed papers.
Copyright handling issues delayed the proceedings,
but IEEE has everything and online indexes should be
complete by mid October.

May 22, 2013
Prof. Dietz and his daughter have donated a birdhouse to
The Arboretum's Birdhouse Display and Benefit Auction.
Why is this here?
Because the birdhouse was 3D printed in our lab.
An Instructable explains how it was built.

May 5, 2013
Well, it was bound to happen sometime....
After all, we've always built stuff, and modern tools for
2D and 3D construction are very much a product of the
computer engineering revolution.
We now have the start of a subsite on making things.

May 2, 2013
Matthew Sparks has completed his M.S. in Electrical Engineering
and his thesis, A Comprehensive HDL Model of a Line Associative
Register Based Architecture, is now
available.

February 5, 2013
Frank Roberts will be presenting a free and open seminar on
KOAPing With The OpenCL API
in 108 Marksbury from 4PM to 5PM.

February 4-5, 2013
Prof. Dietz will be presenting FUJIFILM X10 white orbs and DeOrbIt,
paper number 8660-4, at the IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging conference in San Francisco.
The talk is Feb. 4, and an exhibit with a live demo is Feb. 5.
Here are the slides
and paper preprint.

January 29 - February 1, 2013
The KAOS Group Spring 2013 callout meeting will be held at
three times to make it easier for folks to attend:
4PM Jan. 29, 11AM Jan. 30, and 2PM Feb. 1.
You only need to attend one... well, actually, you don't
even have to attend one -- just sign-up with the listserve,
KAOS@lsv.uky.edu or chat with any of the group
members.

December 21, 2012
Prof. Dietz's daughter has made a video for her science
fair project, and is trying to find out how effective it is.
The less-than-5-minute video discusses her rather unexpected findings
about which colors capture more or less of the sun's heat.
The video and a 10-click multiple-choice quiz about it are at
http://aggregate.org/COOL.
(This has nothing to do with aggregate.org beyond the fact that
we're hosting the custom-built quiz.)

November 12-16, 2012
Aggregate.Org will have a
major research exhibit at
SC12.
We will be showing a lot of things, including
NodeScape, KOAP, KNITT, etc.

September 17, 2012
Callout meeting for participation in our research group
(announcement PDF).
Both graduate and undergraduate students are welcome to our
meeting at noon in 108 Marksbury; pizza will be provided.
There will be a brief tour of our 108A machine room
followed by demos and overview discussion of some
current projects in our group involving
parallel supercomputing and digital imaging.

May 2012
After many years there, we are now moving out of 301 and 302 DVT.
It hasn't been a well-utilized space since we moved into Marksbury,
so the primary effect is that we no longer have
to explain where DVT is.... ;) Secondarily, that's why you no longer
see it on our sensors page.

April 2, 2012The University of Kentucky's basketball team
defeated Kansas 67:59 for our 8th NCAA national title.
Congratulations to our team and Coach Calipari for demonstrating
once again how talent, work, and especially teamwork
make Kentucky better and often best. Sometimes, people don't
see Kentucky, but through this win more people will
See Blue.

March 19, 2012
Can you use some of our free compute cycles?
Yes, UKAN!
We are making some of the "uncommitted KAOS accessible nodes"
freely available to collaborators and worthy projects...
see UKAN for details....

March 7, 2012DeOrbIt WWW tool is posted.
We developed this free tool to make the dreaded Fujifilm X10
"white orbs" look more natural. We plan to release a full
C source code version into the public domain as soon as
tuning is done and a research paper on the method completed,
but this WWW form version is now open for public testing.

February 25, 2012Engineers Day Open House
at the University of Kentucky.
Various activities will be held and many labs will be open.
Come visit us in 672
F. Paul Anderson Tower,
our secondary supercomputer machine room, from 9AM-1PM.
February 23, Lex18's Lee Cruise did a segment
on us in the Marksbury Building, but due to logistics issues,
the Marksbury Building will not be open February 25.
Tours of Marksbury facilities can be scheduled at other times.

November 12-17, 2011
Aggregate.Org will have a
major research exhibit at
SC11.
We will be showing a lot of things, including
MOG (MIMD On GPU), NodeScape, and KNITT (Kentucky Network
ImplementationTopology Tool).

September 7, 2011
Meeting for UK grad & undergrad students interested in
learning about our research group.
Like the hardcopy announcement (PDF) says, we'll have pizza in 108 Marksbury at 1PM.

May 9, 2011
Our new machine room in 108A Marksbury is now reasonably
operational... and we have a new tool, nodescape,
that helps monitor everything.
Here is the current
status of the equipment in 108A Marksbury.

March 14-18, 2011
During UK's Spring Break,
we are starting to power-up our new machine room, etc.,
in the new Davis Marksbury Building. Prof. Dietz now
has his office in room 203, and the new lab and machine
room are room 108 and 108A. Yes, we still have our old
machine room in 672 FPAT... and both are quite full. ;-)